This nytimes article has a very different take. The field is excited at the prospect of new physics: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/13/science/cern-hadron-colli...
Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
81–90 of 316 posts
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#82I only have an amateur interest in physics, so I'm sorry if this sounds dumb, but I often think about what if we've reached as far as we can go within the current framework of physics? This is more meta-science than actual science, but what if we made some decisions very early in the development of physics and mathematics and we need to revisit those?
That's not the problem we face though. Consider the following: For all terrestrial phenomena that we have observe so far we have a theory of everything. In order to put matter into a state where it behaves in such a way that you can tell the difference between two competing theories that describe the world, you have to build the LHC. Anything less than that and the theories all are perfectly good at describing what w…
Let’s build a particle accelerator on the moon. Make it go around the circumference of the entire moon.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does fundamental mean in this case?
I'm not a physicist; but the GP mentioned consciousness as an alternative to matter as the fundamental "substance". Well, I've come across that idea before; in certain kinds of Buddhism, consciousness is considered fundamental, the senses are created by consciousness, and the material world is projected by consciousness through the senses. Well, this was explained to me in the context of a particular type of tantric…
it is a reversal of "I think, therefore I am" -> "I am, therefore I think"
(slight nitpick, the idea(consciousness is fundamental, creation is cyclical) goes back much earlier than buddhism and is part of advaita vedanta.)
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
They haven't found nothing. They've found something, which is nothing. They've looked, been able to rule out some hypotheses of what they might find, and have established some evidence against others. Progress achieved, and the search continues.
This. This author, who should know better, is suggesting that the only "success" is a new discovery. This is patent nonsense. Every time a hypothesis is ruled out, and every time a hypothesis is ruled out with greater confidence, the experiment has succeeded. What is true is that discoveries drive public excitement and public support for additional funding. That is a political problem and it is solvable. If Western g…
> If Western governments can find the public support for trillions in military expenditures, I am confident that it can be found for the comparably meager budgets of the scientific establishment.
Sadly, that achievement -- public support for trillions in military expenditures -- belongs to a not-so-Western government invading a wanna-be-Western government.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#85At least they are finding nothing and confirming they are finding nothing. Less scrupulous operators might be always finding something even if its not there. So that's a sign of good science. Maybe there's something they haven't found because there's so much data? Mix things up and look again? Change assumptions? Or as someone I know likes to say to various smaller humans: have you looked around the couch? Really? Ar…
> Have you had a good look? Are you aware of how hilarious it is in the context of high energy physicists verifying the standard model to ask if they had "good look"? I don't think a collective effort to look any harder has ever existed in the history of humankind.
I've received feedback from some very smart people who laughed out loud and knew exactly what I meant by having a good look. Two of them are physicists and many more are engineers. They said they have found many metaphorical couches and there's a lot of nothing. They've also found quite a few interesting metaphorical paperclips and other debris. But that there's so many more places to look. They also think there's a bunch of metaphorical couches they still haven't found. Its especially hard to look under something when you can't even recognise what it is to look under. Thats part of the difficulty.
They've also assured me they'll let me know when they finally find another metaphorical tv remote.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
They haven't found nothing. They've found something, which is nothing. They've looked, been able to rule out some hypotheses of what they might find, and have established some evidence against others. Progress achieved, and the search continues.
This. This author, who should know better, is suggesting that the only "success" is a new discovery. This is patent nonsense. Every time a hypothesis is ruled out, and every time a hypothesis is ruled out with greater confidence, the experiment has succeeded. What is true is that discoveries drive public excitement and public support for additional funding. That is a political problem and it is solvable. If Western g…
The issue for particle physics specifically, is that they _hope_ to find something that breaks the theory. But so far, only find confirmations of the current Standard Model. Succesful experiments, yeah, but doing little for pushing our understanding of the universe unfortunately.
The reason why they want to break the standard model is, simplified, two-fold:
1. While the theory is incredibly powerful in its domain, we have been unable to unify it with gravity and other theories of matter. This is a problem because it's supposed to be a theory summarizing the fundamental building blocks of the universe and it should therefore describe _everything_.
2. the theory is ugly. It's a mess with many parameters and weird interpretations all shoved together. Physicists don't like this. Not just for aesthetic reasons, but also out of experience. It reminds people of pre-relativity electrodynamics for example. Lorentz had what was essentially a working theory of relativity but it was a mess. People fear the standard model is the new lorentzian relativity, essentially correct but missing some key insight that is needed to fix it.
Finding something that breaks the standard model could go a huge way to solving both these issues. But the standard model just keeps getting confirmed at higher and higher resolution.
In software terms: it's like you know there's a 1/1000'000 bug _somewhere_ in the software but every single test you write to try and find it passes.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#87Stagnation of scientific fields is normal and can last many years. In that time, little anomalies pile up, are swept under the rug, and largely forgotten. To admit anomalies can ruin careers, after all. Eventually someone (often very young/inexperienced) comes along and upends the field by proposing a different model or doing the experiment whose weight breaks the camels back. What's new here is the scale of the work…
Well that's not the case though: you can upend the field with data from the LHC - after all Einstein didn't do the Michelson-Mauley (how I spelt that right) experiment himself, but Special Relativity was developed out of that result existing.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not the problem we face though. Consider the following: For all terrestrial phenomena that we have observe so far we have a theory of everything. In order to put matter into a state where it behaves in such a way that you can tell the difference between two competing theories that describe the world, you have to build the LHC. Anything less than that and the theories all are perfectly good at describing what w…
Let’s build a particle accelerator on the moon. Make it go around the circumference of the entire moon.
For the effort it would be easier to build one around the Earth. Double it up as a driveable highway, rail and electrical infrastructure (and then you can use solar power sold on a global market where one side is always in daylight).
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
They haven't found nothing. They've found something, which is nothing. They've looked, been able to rule out some hypotheses of what they might find, and have established some evidence against others. Progress achieved, and the search continues.
This. This author, who should know better, is suggesting that the only "success" is a new discovery. This is patent nonsense. Every time a hypothesis is ruled out, and every time a hypothesis is ruled out with greater confidence, the experiment has succeeded. What is true is that discoveries drive public excitement and public support for additional funding. That is a political problem and it is solvable. If Western g…
> If Western governments can find the public support for trillions in military expenditures, I am confident that it can be found for the comparably meager budgets of the scientific establishment.
We just need, occasionally, a belligerent something to do something to remind us of why experimental particle physics is needed in its equivalent of peace-time.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#90All I'm hoping for from the LHC is that they collapse the false vacuum.